I’ve just launched my first newsletter, Context Switch! Each month, I’ll let you know about what I’ve been up to– publications, events, any workshops I’m leading. And then a few times a year, I’ll feature a profile interview with an artist from a wide range of disciplines, about all the different stuff they do, and the career pivots they’ve made, to keep creative life going. My first interview, with Natalia Yanchak, of The Dears and game dev fame, went out on Friday. You can see it now in the archive, and sign up to receive the next one, here: https://www.jillmurray.com/newsletter-archive/?email_id=10

The post Context Switch Interview: Natalia Yanchak of The Dears appeared first on Jill Murray.

There I will be embracing five key challenges:

1. Learn where the apostrophe goes in King’s
2. Work on a book about my weaving grandmother, who you may already recognize from this web site
3. Refamiliarize myself with the publishing industry
4. Get into a rhythm of delivering chapters regularly, and doing social media in a more organized, and contributing fashion
5. Learn how to spell “nonfiction” without a hyphen

It’s a low-residency programme, so after my week at school, and a bit of vacation in Nova Scotia, I’ll be back in Montreal as usual, and open to more work in video games (that work is at Discoglobe.ca). Nothing changes there!

I also have a new NEWSLETTER, so please sign up if you’d like to accompany me on my journey. I am not yet organized and haven’t committed to what I’ll be writing in this newsletter so take your life into your own hands, and SIGN UP AND FIND OUT. I’ll be sending it once a month to start. It will be a miracle if I can stick to this schedule.

The post Back to School appeared first on Jill Murray.

For now we’re just trying to do better than last year.

Not that last year was bad– it was great– and most importantly it was better than the year before, which was better than the year before that, when we didn’t even have a garden. It’s just that last year, we took an Urban Agriculture course, and learned, week by week, why and how we could have planned better, to get more out of it.

Last year we pretty much only planted SUMMER things. It was a tomatosplosion. We had hot peppers for years. (Literally. Even after making spicy jam, there are still peppers in my freezer.)

So we started trying to do better last fall, by laying down some wood chip mycelium in a shady part of the garden, and by harvesting seeds from our favourite tomatoes and hot peppers.

For 2025, we’re doing our best to acknowledge that spring and fall exist as growing seasons. In addition to our raised beds, we’re improving some of the soil in the actual ground, in our postage stamp of yard. We’re growing fruit, we’re rotating crops. We’re observing which perennials can survive a winter, and what fights back against the neighbours’ invasive vines. (Mint, on both counts.)

Here’s what we’ve started so far:

• We did start seedlings for 3 varieties of tomato under grow lights, because a long head start inside is key to a bumper crop that fruits early and goes all summer
• Ditto for peppers because they ripen so late. We want to give them as much time as they need.
• Weeded around the mint, just enough to give it a fighting chance. Pollinators nest in the old leaves from last year, so we don’t want to disturb the ground too much.
• Removed the lumpy pile of unworkable mixed soil and garbage from the corner, because okay fine, some ground deserves to be disturbed.
• Looked up which leafy greens do well outside in early spring, and went and got seeds from the library. (Yes! We can get seeds at the library! X packets each, up to 3 times per season.)
• Compulsively bought a few more seeds at our local Korean grocery store.
• Planted Napa cabbage that started growing very fast right away
• Moved the tomatoes, cabbage, and some of the peppers upstairs to the sun porch, because they were already too tall for our growing shelves
• Amended the soil in our raised bed with compost and chicken manure pellets, which our class assures us are as good or better than chemical fertilizers
• Planted Korean spinach, kale, chard, arugula and lettuce outside. The lettuce and chard were from old seed packs so who knows if they’ll grow.
• Planted basil, thyme, and a native flower called Immortelles inside under the grow lights.
• Created a couple of shiitake mushroom logs, that should fruit in a year or so, and added them to the mushroom patch
• Acquired 2 raspberry bushes to plant in the spot where the garbage pile used to be
• Amended the soil in the ground for those bushes with fruit-shrub-friendly potting soil, compost, and chicken manure.
• Walked around a bit on the mushroom patch, to let our baby winecaps know we care, and encourage them to spread and grow
• Observed that our bulbs in the small garden in front of the house seem to be sprouting. Will they flower? Who knows…
• Added two raspberry bushes to the end of the yard by the neighbor’s fence. (She agreed to modify the fence to let more sun through.)
• Got some flowering catmint, and two echinacea plants to attract pollinators
• Set up a new compost bin
• Threw an old mushroom-growing block into the compost and smashed it with a shovel as punishment for not fruiting indoors for three months
• Came back down a week later to find the compost bin fruiting with luxurious edible mushrooms
• Retrieved the mushroom block bits from the compost and stashed them around shady parts of the garden
• Planted kale, chard, arugula, spinach, peas and beans. The beans and kale didn’t sprout at all.
• Drilled a couple of logs and filled them with shiitake mycelium.
• Someone stole the mushroom logs
• Replaced the logs but not the mycelium plugs. That’ll have to wait for a quiet afternoon.

And perhaps most importantly, we started writing things down! Names of plants on tags, notes in the notebook, and of course the blog you’re reading now.

The post Garden Season appeared first on Jill Murray.

I’ve been collecting archival information about my grandmother, Bessie Murray, and the Nova Scotia Tartan. I found this Macleans cover from 1957 in an old email from my dad, that I think really gets across the “tartanism” of the time. The tartan was just four years old at this point, and apparently, already plastered all over everything– thanks in large part to the initiative of premier Angus L. Macdonald.

Despite its name, Nova Scotia at this time, and since its founding was actually not predominantly Scottish. Apparently Ontario had a larger Scottish community. The Extremely Scottish version of Nova Scotia seems to have been largely an invention of tourism marketing, designed to capture the business of Americans seeking a “foreign” experience, without the hassle of going overseas. The province already had the rolling hills and the sea, and Bessie’s tartan arrived at just the right time to serve as an emblem for the movement, and increasingly, for the province itself.

Long before it was Nova Scotia, this place was home to the Mi’kmaq. The colonising settlers that arrived thereafter were not only from the UK, but also France (hello, Acadians) and Germany. It was also home to a significant number of Black loyalists, and workers from the Caribbean. So there are some people missing from this extremely white cover image. (Everyone’s hair even seems to be redder in the “after” image.)

For further reading on this topic, I’ve found a pair of very interesting articles, from historian Ian McKay, and art historian Hilary Doda. I’m sure I’ll return to them many times, as my research continues.

I asked my dad about it, and he said “it was a different time”– an incomplete statement, but I suppose not inaccurate. This particular issue of Canada’s biggest national magazine also included this two page opinion piece about how one guy finds all women dishonest. You would need to work in the manosphere to write a piece like this today!

Okay, so the times are not actually that different. But still, I think of my grandmother, an artist and master weaver, founding and running her business at the time, and I wonder just how she did it.

The post Tartan mania appeared first on Jill Murray.

I bring my warp over to the loom, as instructed.

It looks to me like this loom would be easier to thread front to back, because it’s easier to identify where the center is, and the reed doesn’t move around everywhere like the heddles do. But what do I know? Nothing. Literally nothing. I’m just going on vibes.

You Can Weave has no advice for threading it front to back, (which is backwards, maybe?) and my loom has different bits than most modern looms that show up in how-tos, so I have to wing it a bit, with the help from another YouTube tutorial.

The process involves first passing some 200-odd threads through each tooth of the reed, starting from the centre, and moving outward.

Then, I need to pass every thread through the heddles. Each heddle is a a strand of twisted wire with a hole halfway up. The heddles are mounted on one of the four cards, on a pair of metal runners, that lets them slide around, left and right. The cards are responsible for moving the warp up and down. and the heddles hold them in place.

For my basic plain weave, I need to thread it in a repeating 1-2-3-4 pattern (1 thread per card, over and over again), otherwise I’ll end up with a different weave pattern than I was planning.

When that’s done, I tie everything onto the back rod and gently wind the back, so I don’t have too much excess yarn in front, but also don’t risk pulling any of the yarn through the heddles. (Spoiler: I do, in fact, pull some of the yarn through some of the heddles.)

Then I tie my warp threads to the rod in front, after quite a lot of puzzling over which way the crank is meant to turn. And Penelope stops by to make sure I’m doing it right / plan how to turn the dressed loom into a cat toy.

With everything nicely tied off, I examine the reed and, after a lot of squinting, notice I’ve missed a few slots. I curse my decision to use dishwater grey thread. Some of the heddles are a bit warped or sticky (sticky as in the metal is rough, so there’s friction, not like covered-in-honey sticky), and I’ve also botched the 1-2-3-4 pattern in places. Counting to four is harder than you might expect.

A few days later, once my frustration and fury subside, I take it all apart and put it back together again, in the right order, with nothing missing. It’s pleasingly orderly. You Can Weave kindly asks me to insert 1″ cardboard strips at the head of my warp. This will preserve some thread to use as tassels.

I test the tension of my threads by pressing gently on it with a finger crossing several threads at once. It all needs to have equal tension, or the result will be messy. I retie my knots to improve tension as necessary. Then I notice that one side of the warp threads are harder to keep tensioned than the other, which I assume means my Frankenloom is not level (are you surprised? I am shocked. LOLOLOL.) I give up trying to compensate for it with knots, and just jam a pile of cardboard strips between the warp and the backbeam. That seems to take care of it.

We’re not done yet! We still need to get thread onto a bobbin, to put into the shuttle, so we can weave our weft thread back and forth. I notice that you can spend a lot of money on a bobbin winder if you want to. It should come as a surprise to no one, that I don’t. I’m also not interested in winding anything by hand, ever. Luckily, I try popping the bobbin on the end of a drill bit and it fits perfectly. DeWalt to the rescue.

And that’s it! We’re ready to go!

About a week and a half has passed from the time I make my warp, to when the loom is dressed and ready to begin weaving. But Frankie Loom and I are sticking with this. We’re going to get it done.

Just not right now, ’cause I’m exhausted.

The post Getting Dressed appeared first on Jill Murray.

The post Some game narrative posts about scope appeared first on Jill Murray.

Rodrigue has a favourite old wool jacket that’s full of holes, from regular wear and moths, and during the pandemic lockdown, I ordered a “speedweve” type mending loom— but never used it.

These little looms were originally sold in the 1940s, and now they’re plentiful on Etsy. They’re fairly simple to use, and allow you to weave a small patch directly onto a piece of clothing to conceal a hole.

I got some darning yarn in compatible colours from a local knitting store, and got to work, using the project as a chance to practice some basic weaving patterns.

At the outset of this venture, we identified three holes that needed mending, but by the time I was done, I’d made 11 patches. The more acquainted I became with the jacket, the more worn spots I found.

The patches are messy in spots– sometimes unavoidable because near the seams, the fabric was too bulky and would slip off the loom. But I’m overall satisfied with the finished look of the jacket, and I learned a lot while doing it– including that sometimes it’s easier to just weave directly onto the garment, setting aside the loom.

Most importantly, we’ve saved a beloved jacket from the landfill, and I’ve reignited my mending habit, which is definitely going to serve us, in this time of an impending trade war.

The post Visible Mending with a Darning Loom appeared first on Jill Murray.

I don’t yet know what I’m doing, but that doesn’t stop me having big ambitions for this yarn.

According to the manuscript for a pamphlet Bessie collaborated on with journalist Marjorie Major sometime around 1972:

The colours of the Nova Scotia Tartan represent:

• Blue for the sea and the sky
• Green for the trees
• White for the surf
• Red for the lion on Nova Scotia’s crest
• Gold for the Royal Charter

I too, intend to create a tartan. But I’m from Montreal, Quebec’s land of bike lanes, orange construction cones, and hanging out in parks. My allegiance lies not with any charter, but with the Metro system. And I’m allergic to wool, so wool is out. The tartan will probably be a cotton blend. Likely a hand towel. I’m interested in utility, not dignity. I select:

• Grey for the bike lanes and potholes
• Orange for the cones, the changing leaves of fall, and the Orange Line of the metro
• Blue for the province, the St-Laurent river, the sky, and the Blue Line of the metro
• Green for the parks and trees and the Green Line
• And I can’t count, so I forget to buy some yellow for the long summer days, bright January sun, and of course, the Yellow Line.

They’re all cotton-linen, in a fine gauge, perfect for dish towels.

I set about making my first warp– the strands that stretch through the loom on the vertical axis, making it possible to weave back and forth through them. (The book does not explain this– or at least not at this juncture. I have to look it up, lol.)

The first project in You Can Weave is a placemat-napkin set in a simple weave. So we won’t be making the Montreal Tartan just yet. I decide to start with a nice grey & blue scheme, and I choose the grey for the warp because no part of me is thinking ahead to how hard pale grey yarn will be to see when photographed over and over in dim winter light.

The steps of making a warp appear very detailed and complex on paper. I remind myself that children are meant to follow these instructions, and try to relax.

The book explains how to measure for your project and its affordances. I believe I do this part accurately. Pretty sure. It’s not complicated math but there’s always a possibility my ADHD will try to change a digit in between reading it and writing it down. I measure several times, which will either make it more accurate, or introduce a new error every time. Exciting!

Then we get to the measuring that I definitely for certain mess up. I have to count the teeth of my reed several times, and then I lose track and try it a different way, and every single time, I get a different number. Pah! I’ll average it.

One thing is for certain: the teeth of my reed are roughly twice as far apart as the ones in the book. Looking at how skinny my yarn is, I imagine this will result in a wider weave than intended– maybe too wide.

Buying new yarn isn’t an option because these spools cost something like $15 each, and I already bought four of them. I’m committed.

I decide to move ahead with what I have and find out what happens. I don’t mind a bad first result if it means I viscerally understand why it is bad, because I made it bad with my own hands, and felt the texture of its badness.

Our carpentry teacher in theatre school taught us that there are two ways to learn anything– “the Easy Way and the Hard Way. The Hard Way is to read everything about it, measure assiduously, quadruple check everything… and the Easy Way is to just try it once, and screw it up completely.” I take great heart in this advice, and refer back to it regularly.

Next I need to place my pegs, which is straightforward…

Except that I don’t have pegs, so I use some chairs, following a trick I picked up from a YouTube video.

I put my nearly-invisible yarn spool in a bowl on the floor so it can’t roll around everywhere, and begin winding, according to the pattern the book dictates.

This could be a huge, boring pain in the butt, but I put on a podcast or three, and gently wind away, swaying from one chair to the other and back, 200 times or so, and I find it quite meditative and soothing. It takes me basically all night, but I enjoy the tranquility of it.

The book explains when to tie bunches of yarn together, and how to make sure you’re crossing the yarn in the right place, and right direction, and make sure it doesn’t uncross later, when you untie it.

At some point, Penelope comes around and decides to help me test the mouthfeel of the yarn, and its suitability as a cat toy. 10/10 with bonus points in both cases, but it does slow me down a little.

I tie everything down, probably more than I need to, because the 2d drawings of yarn are not always adequate for understanding a 3d space.

And then I’m able to remove it, and set it aside until I’m ready to dress the loom. I had originally planned to dress in the same session, but I’m starting to understand this is a slow process– at least for me, in this stage of learning– and I’d rather confront the next step, fully rested, with a clear head.

You Can Weave – archives

• April 2025 (2)
• January 2025 (3)

The post You Can Weave: Let’s Get Warped appeared first on Jill Murray.

Not so fast.

Not only do I not have yarn, but the loom is missing some parts, and I don’t know enough about looms to know what’s missing.

I momentarily wonder if I’ve made a huge mistake. What if I never figure out what this thing needs, and it turns out to be a lemon?

You Can Weave doesn’t have anything specific to say about what to do with the funky old loom you bought at a bike repair clinic. But I can pick out cases where Bessie and Mary have outlined what to do, if you don’t have exactly the thing you’re meant to have.

I’m especially fond of the illustrated explanation on page 20, suggesting how to make pegs out of an old broomstick, or a few plain metal bookends. (Bookends! How exciting. I’m not sure it’s easier to find plain metal bookends than pegs, in 2025.)

Weaving is an old technology. We can apparently find suggestions of weaving as far back as the paleolithic age, 27,000 years ago. It shows up in ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian art, the Inca civilization, and tombs from the bronze age, in China.

There’s no known causal link between all our cultures and learning to weave. It’s a primordial tech solution everyone figured out independently, in response to having both fibre, and a need to wrap something– usually people, either the living or the dead.

People have been improvising looms for centuries (and still do today), using whatever they had around, in whatever way made sense in their culture. Seen through that lens, my incomplete loom is a head start, not a hinderance.

How much of a head start do I have? Let’s evaluate.

A table loom mainly has the job of using multiple shafts to raise and lower x-axis strands of yarn on a z-axis, so that y-axis strands of yarn can be passed back and forth through it on the perpendicular, at user-defined intervals, to create an interlocking weave that becomes fabric. The x-axis strands must be held with tension, and they need to advance from the back to the front of the loom on rollers, so you can control your materials, and gather up your product.

How well your loom performs each of those functions has a bearing on the physical and aesthetic quality of the fabric produced. But it’s not the only factor. You, your ideas, skills, and consistency, are part of the equation. This relationship between person and machine is one I already know, from playing musical instruments, and operating an espresso machine. I’m comfortable with it.

My loom appears to have the most important bits. Maybe not in an ergonomic configuration, possibly not calibrated precisely, but fine for learning. My attention to the loom will become a third factor in what I’m able to make.

Now let’s take a look at the nonstandard features of this loom:

It doesn’t have levers to help raise and lower the shafts. It has four holes, and makeshift hooks. The previous owner appears to have been using yellow yarn to control the shafts. It seems like yarn would brake frequently and be fussy to use here.

The shafts also don’t have tracks to sit in. They just kind of dangle and bump into each other.

There’s no back beam. It has a big turny thing instead (technical term), which doesn’t seem to match any tutorials I can find so far. I think I can work with it, but the Big Turny Thing ™ also doesn’t have a brake. I’ll need to improvise something for tension.

The rods in front and back appear to be made of wooden dowling. I expect this means it will bend more than a metal rod, creating uneven tension, in places. And the front rod is attached to the front roller at uneven intervals.

It’s tempting to try to fix everything, but I don’t want to do that, before I understand how the machine works. I also read more than once, that many weavers fall so deeply into the hole of fixing or perfecting their looms, that the loom becomes the project and no weaving gets done.

This sounds exactly like something I would do, so I resolve not to do it. To brake the back roller (Big Turny Thing), I’ll experiment with various cords, bungees and wooden stakes until I find something that works. I’ll focus on improving the shaft control mechanism.

I work out a hack where I replace the yellow yarn with stronger-yet-terrible nylon cord from the dollar store, and loops of zip tie, so I can more easily hook and unhook the cords when I raise and lower the shafts.

This single fix takes me a couple of hours to orchestrate, after trying a few kinds of knot that don’t work. I ultimately have to melt the nylon a bit to get it to bind to itself and stop unwinding.

By the time I’m done, I’m equal parts tired, fed up, sweaty, and extremely satisfied with myself. I admire my work, and decide to name my loom Frankie. Frankie the Frankenloom.

Now all I need is yarn. And a shuttle. I order them, and wait.

You Can Weave – archives

• April 2025 (2)
• January 2025 (3)

The post You Can Weave: Meet Frankie, the Frankenloom appeared first on Jill Murray.

As I mentioned in my introductory post, You Can Weave has no advice on choosing a loom. It just says, quite suddenly on page 24, “Carry the warp to the loom carefully.”

Step 1: I need a loom.

There are many different types of looms. The one pictured in the book is a table loom. Table looms have the advantage of functioning like a big floor loom, but they take up less space, and are less expensive. They have multiple shafts for raising and lowering the yarns, which allows for weaving different patterns. Because they’re smaller, the fabric they produce is not as wide as the product of a floor loom.

When I say a table loom is less expensive, I don’t mean it’s not expensive. A brand new, 16-inch wide, 4-shaft table loom will run you somewhere between $700 and $1200 CAD with tax. At this price, you can count on a nice wooden device with well-functioning modern mechanics. At that width, you’ll be all set to weave things like scarves, kitchen towels, and placemats.

$700 is a hefty price for my current mood of “can I weave tho?” I balk.

Time to look at secondhand listings– which I prefer anyway. Why bring more new Stuff into the world when good old things are right there?

A perusal of the local offerings reveal that if you can find one, a secondhand table loom of mysterious quality and origin might run you about $400 CAD. It might be wider or narrower, have two or four or eight cards, be missing bits or not, and be of almost any age. They seem to sell fast, but if you can find one that suits you, you will be paying around $400 for whatever it is.

I’m feeling the urgency of this project, and don’t really understand much about looms yet, so I’m not terribly picky. After messaging a few people and striking out a couple of times, I manage to secure a 24″ loom with no brand name, that the seller assures me was ancient and falling apart, so she remounted most of it on a heavy plywood frame. She’s selling it because she doesn’t have room to keep it. Newer table looms fold away for storage. This one is permanently the size and shape that it is.

I have the benefit of:

• not relying on on modern instructions and expectations, but on the hand-drawn 1970s loom of You Can Weave
• Like most people in my family, believing without evidence that I can alter or fix anything

The Frankenloom I’m looking at is similar enough to the drawings. I decide it will be Fine.

I happen to be borrowing my mom’s car for the holidays, so I take advantage, to drive up to Ahuntsic, to a community bike repair clinic where, among the bike parts and tools, in a workshop only faintly smelling of metal, grease, and rubber, I meet the seller, Quaterine, and her grandmother’s loom. She points out many things about it– how it works, what it’s missing, how I could improve it, that it needs an oiling from time to time to keep the extremely old, dry wood cooperative. I understand almost nothing of what she tells me, as I do not yet Can Weave.

Truth be known, I’m a hands-on learner, so I usually need to do a thing to really understand it. There are many pertinent questions I should probably ask, but since i haven’t done the thing yet, I don’t know how to. Quaterine tells me the 24-inch loom is cool because you can juuust get wide enough fabric out of it to make a t-shirt, skirt, or some dresses. I’m excited, and convinced enough that she has really worked with this thing, and that I will, somehow, be able to Can Weave on it, as well.

I trade her the story of my own grandmother’s weaving, and promise to send her photos from the book. She decides to let me have the loom for an even $300, and helps me carry it down the snowy half block to the car. As we walk we laugh about how as cyclists, neither of us is in the habit of thinking about parking. It’s a miracle I found a good spot in the snow. This whole morning feels like a miracle. I’m having a great time.

I get the loom home and lug it upstairs and into my office.

Cool. Now what? I have no idea how this thing works. The instructions in You Can Weave do not exactly match the construction of this loom. Some things are different, some things are missing, and I’m not knowledgeable enough yet to tell the difference. I don’t even know what kind of yarn I need, or where to get it.

I accept that I’ll probably need to deviate from the plan of just relying on the book, and bust out all the tutorials and videos The Internet has to offer. I begin to search. I wonder what Bessie would have thought of The Internet? As the president of the weaver’s guild, she probably would have used it to connect with weavers around Nova Scotia. If she was managing a weaving shop today, she would have needed a social media strategy. I imagine an Instagram feed where my toddler father shows up every few posts, cranking the handle of the loom, yards of Nova Scotia tartan spilling into Stories and Reels and videos, the influencer weirdness of today melding with the so-what-child-labour weirdness of yesteryear.

The loom, looms back at me. I have my work cut out.

You Can Weave – archives

• April 2025 (2)
• January 2025 (3)

The post You Can Weave: It Looms appeared first on Jill Murray.